10 Greatest Programming Milestones In Gaming History

7. Wolfenstein 3D

Back in the late 80s and early 90s strives were being made to take games to the third dimension. The problem was that the technology available wasn't powerful enough to render 3D properly, so programmers had to get creative to work around hardware limitations. One of these programmers was John Carmack, who throughout the 90s and 2000s was considered by many to be the Jesus of the programming world. His innovative programming technique called 'ray casting' used scalable sprites to create the pseudo-3D effect seen above. It was so efficient that it could even run on graphical calculators. Wolfenstein 3D was the third game to use this technique, but it had a much more profound impact on the industry than its predecessors. It was the best implementation of the tech so far, and its gory, Nazi-shooting gameplay laid the foundations for Doom, Duke Nukem, Quake and pretty much every other shooter of the decade that followed it.